6 Amazing and Unexpected Uses for Aluminum Foil

Painting made easy

We love to bust out the aluminum foil when painting. And the reason is simple: the foil helps us out in a couple of very important ways.

For example, let’s say that you need to paint a room in your house. Before you pour the paint into the can, we recommend putting some aluminum foil down into the can. When you’re done, all you will need to do is take out the foil instead of clean the can itself.

And while painting, we discovered that aluminum foil is a more effective way of protecting handles and door knobs from the paint. It can be very difficult to get painter’s tape around these raised surfaces, but aluminum foil makes it easy for you to paint doors without accidentally getting paint in unwanted areas.

Pain relief

It’s become something of a pop culture punchline that crazy people think that wearing a foil hat can help them prevent being mind-controlled. While there is obviously no basis in reality for this, wearing aluminum foil on parts of your body that are in pain really can help you feel better.

How is this supposed to work, exactly? Basically, your body has meridians in it that help regulate the flow of energy through your body. Putting foil on an affected area (like wrapping it around an injured foot) overnight helps with this regulation and helps you recover quicker. And if the idea still sounds crazy, keep in mind that doctors in China, Russia, and other countries around the world recommend this as an easy home remedy for pain relief.

Clean your pans more effectively

There is something especially annoying about stains on your favorite pans. These stains are usually more than the dishwasher can handle, and you can easily spend hours personally scrubbing the stains without successfully removing them.

If you have a pan like that, then we suggest putting baking soda and just a bit of water in the pan. Next, dump the water out and ball up the aluminum foil. Use it to scrape away the stains, and while you’re at it, take the time to admire a pan that looks better than it has in months (if not years).

Get better wifi (no, really)

Okay, this one’s going to sound even crazier than the pain relief tip, but bear with us. Do you have any areas in your home where the wifi is slow and ineffective? Most people do, which is why there is such a big market for things like internet extenders.

But maybe you don’t want to spend a small fortune putting ugly internet extenders throughout your house. In that case, try putting a bit of aluminum foil behind your router or wireless model. The foil helps to deflect any signals that might be going the wrong way, effectively boosting the outgoing signal and making your connections stronger throughout the house.

The key to cleaner dishes

Sometimes, we feel like our dishwasher has truly betrayed us. After all, the entire point of a dishwasher is that we can just hit a few buttons and let it do all the work instead of us scrubbing every dish. But when dishes and utensils still look dirty out of the dishwasher, we end up back at square one having to manually clean them.

Does this story sound familiar? Here’s a tip that might just change your life: before you turn your dishwasher on next time, put a little ball of aluminum foil in with your utensils. Thanks to a special chemical reaction between the foil and the dish soap, everything should come out clean on the very first wash.

Cleaning that grill grate

If you’re anything like us, you probably have a love/hate relationship with grilling food. It’s easy to love how amazing everything tastes, but nobody likes the annoyance of having to clean the grill’s grate between uses.

However, this is going to change your grill game forever: instead of trying to scrub the grate using more traditional methods, try balling up some aluminum foil first and using it to scrub everything down. Those annoying bits of burned food will come right off, and you can get back to grilling some tasty food!